Kirjahaku

Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), the most important female author of Spain’s nineteenth century, was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, critical articles, chronicles of modern life, and plays. Active in the age of Catholic social teaching inaugurated by Pope Leo XIII, Pardo Bazán imagined religion as an underpinning for personal and social organization. She addressed the individual experience of faith and culture, and focused on the tension between individualism and the social aspects of religious practice. As a talented literary artist herself, Pardo Bazán was no stranger to the challenges faced by gifted, privileged members of society, particularly in the form of temptations offered by modernity and its widespread encouragement of self-seeking. She wrote repeatedly about the change of heart that may be experienced by intellectually and materially advantaged individuals, and shared details of her own spiritual journey, arguing that once the creative person redefines herself as Franciscan instrument, she is able to contribute through her art and actions to the realization of a personalist society rich in sacramentality. Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazán, then, is an analysis of how this early feminist put her unique talents to work for her nation, and blended into the worshipping body of Spain by creating for her compatriots a sacramental vision that enriched and commemorated their daily lives.

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Pérez Gald&#243s's first series of Episodios nacionales, Pío Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas Clarín's La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixoticism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy. The book's conclusion suggests that the external authors, who wrote these novels about quixotic author-characters' lingering romanticism, imagine themselves as Cervantes figures: they draw on the power of romanticism within their texts, but protect themselves from romanticism's 'dangerous' links to the feminine and irrationality by recalling their male mentor. This study, then, situates itself in the critical tradition that has articulated the porosity of the terms romanticism and realism - the indissoluble marriage of the Hispanic nineteenth century.

Writing Teresa: The Saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo examines the Teresa de Jesús “boom” of roughly 1880–1930 and offers an in-depth study of five major Spanish participants in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century explosion of literary treatments of St. Teresa. This historical period’s interest in the Saint from Ávila relates to popularization and nationalization of aspects of Catholicism, technological advances, a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, the search for new Spanish identities, and the evolving role of women writers and intellectuals. Teresa was mysticism in its historical context, energy in a time of doubt, the possibility of reconciling science and spirituality, a new vision for writing, and a maternal figure linked to the religion of the past for those who had lost the faith of their childhood.